Author Archives: José Araguz

  —after Walking Man II and Three Men Walking II by Alberto Giacometti, The Art Institute of Chicago   I.   I’m not alone in this compulsion to touch, to contribute one more fingerprint, my salt and oil, nor in … Read More

  You have to squint these days to taste the berry in the blackberries. Still, you eat even the bad ones.   All because the date on the package has passed. It’s a morning for toast, cold in the house. … Read More

  A skillet crackles, a raw crescent And bit of butter becoming, Inevitably, a lone browned, curved Pungent thing, a scalding mouthful   Soon slipping down a throat: consumption Always has its painful temporal logic. Let’s imagine The cooked sliver … Read More

  Flourish, unwashed, unpeeled, bouncy boys; grow, citizen-workers, clothed in good dirt— dearest ones, I place my hope in you— your green is king, in my garden. Chopped, you are cukes, (my Wisconsin mamma loschen)—fluted, celebrated, bobbing in vinegar and … Read More

  Everything is just like everything else only on a different scale. Galaxies spin like atoms, sure, but also the country has this cloud of negative   electricity around it that is only one particle stirring. I made up my … Read More

  Rosie, who’s dying of malabsorption, yaps on the front porch. A walking ossuary, she treads the matchboards and waits for the Witnesses—two young women who must smell faintly, I think, of fried food or red rubber balls or mud. … Read More

  Headlight-brightened bodies pass by, briefly, before blackening again in the nameless expanse of gulch & grass. One could almost say   illusion, that all this seeing is a trick the light plays to keep us   rooted in place. … Read More

  I am listening    by which I mean humming over      by which I mean talking over a bit less than usual       to one of those songs I’m told     have molded generations which I assume must mean something has changed inside … Read More

  What happens when no one who could hold a pen saw your great- aunt as human: records and recordings pinprick your neck’s back— Before they called us stupid coolies, we descended from the Moon, made of the star white … Read More

  You see only an impression in dug earth, long settled into dent on the forested floor: an unmarked grave where a corpse sinks. Moss- covered granite fieldstones in electric green.   The surface falls as a body returns into … Read More

  Cloudy, primal green floods the canvas, superimposed with a scarlet maple and sepia poplar leaf upright as rooted trunks. A trinity—three seasons— death closest.   Stages of cancer—yours IV when found near Easter. You died in the height of … Read More

  —from The Warhol Letters   I’ve become obsessed with bears & I hear you laughing at me through a veil   of Fire Island sweat & zinc oxide. Summer smells salty, sure, but more chemical   than what’s iodized. … Read More